Wednesday, July 12, 2017

The Story of China, parts 5 and 6 (MayaVision International, Mandarin Film Productions, PBS, 2017)

My “feature” last evening was the
final two episodes of a PBS mini-series called The Story of China, written, produced and directed by Michael Wood for
something called “MayaVision International” (though the imdb.com page on the
show lists the production company as “Mandarin Film Productions,” which frankly
makes more sense for a movie about historical China!). Wood is one of those
annoying Brits who clog up most of PBS’s travel shows, but the Chinese series —
the last two of its six episodes, anyway — is surprisingly good. Part five,
“The Last Empire,” starts in the 17th Century, when China was
conquered by the Manchus, Mongol-descended armies from the northern province of
Manchuria, four centuries after the previous Mongol conquest by Genghis Khan
and his Golden Hordes. Like those Mongols, these ones may have won the battle but eventually
China assimilated them; the Manchus, also known as the Qing (pronounced
“Ching”) Dynasty, took over the political and administrative system of China
and just installed themselves at the top. They also absorbed traditional
Chinese culture much the way the Romans absorbed Greek culture after they
conquered what was left of Alexander the Great’s Hellenistic empire, both China’s
artistic traditions and its spiritual ones — particularly the reverence for
ancestors and the teachings of Confucius. The early Manchu rulers of China were
three long-lived princes who seemed to have been trying to run a benevolent
despotism much the way Kemal Atatürk would do in early 20th-Century
Turkey; like the people running China today, they offered the Chinese a system
that functioned effectively and brought relative economic prosperity as long as
the Chinese didn’t dissent and politely and calmly paid the Manchu rulers the
taxes they demanded.

It’s occurred to me that the Chinese do empire
considerably better than the U.S. — partly because they’ve literally been at it
for millennia — mainly because when they conquered a territory, instead of running
roughshod over it they let the local authorities pretty much continue to run
things, and all they asked for was “suzerainty and tribute” — “suzerainty”
meaning that the people accepted the Chinese as the folks generally in charge
and “tribute” that they agreed to pay a pretty large sum of money to the
Chinese central government. (There have
been exceptions — notably the attempt by the Chinese in Tibet in the 1950’s not
only to conquer but to obliterate Tibetan culture — and Wood makes an
interesting contrast between the way the Manchus treated Tibet when they moved in, including offering protection to the Dalai Lama
and actually building a reproduction of his palace in their capital, Beijing,
and the way Mao’s Communists treated Tibet in the 1950’s.) It’s occurred to me
that such a large part of the U.S. national debt is owed to the Chinese
government — they and the banks they own are our single largest creditor — that
some day they may simply announce that they are foreclosing and from now on
they own us, but they will probably
treat us like the Manchus (and the previous imperial dynasties from China’s
largest ethnic group, the Han) did their
dependent territories: ask us for recognition of their ultimate authority
(including suppression of any political
or cultural material opposing China — something that’s already started to
happen, actually: the reason you haven’t seen any pro-Tibetan or anti-Chinese
movies out of Hollywood since the brief spate of them two decades ago,
including Seven Years in Tibet and Kundun, is that studios are too
committed to getting their films shown in China to risk doing anything to alienate the Chinese authorities) and large sums of
money to pay off the interest on our debt (since we’re way too much in hock to them to have any hope of paying the
principal), but will otherwise pretty much leave us alone.

Anyway, “The Last
Empire” had some interesting points, though in keeping with Wood’s rather
whirlwind survey (he was a triple-threat player here as director, writer and narrator) the final deterioration of the Qing court and in
particular the control of the Empress Dowager aren’t even mentioned. The film does depict the last Emperor, Pu Yi, via what appears to be a
clip from Bernardo Bertolucci’s marvelous film The Last Emperor (well, on a British TV budget they were hardly likely to
be able or willing to duplicate a Chinese accession ceremony themselves!); he
took the throne, so to speak, at age two and was deposed at age six (much the
way the last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, fell from the throne at
age four), and it attributes the collapse of Qing China to the West,
particularly the British. China’s problems with the West in general and Britain
in particular, according to Wood’s portrayal, date back to the 1780’s, when the
British obsession with tea led to a severe balance-of-payments problem with
China. The British East India Company had already moved in and literally
conquered India (a lot of people don’t know that there was a century during
which India was under “Company rule” — the private British East India Company literally governed India as its corporate property before it ceded
it to the British government in the mid-19th century and formed what
became known as the Raj), but India
alone couldn’t supply the enormous British tea market. China insisted on being
paid for tea in hard currency — gold and silver — and this led to an enormous
balance-of-payments problem as Britain’s trade deficit with China threatened to
suck its treasury dry. The British racked their brains to come up with
something, anything, they could trade
with China to pay for their tea, and after organizing a huge trade show for the
Qing Emperor and having him express total disinterest in all the manufactured
goods and gimcracks they were offering as “not fit even for children’s toys,”
the British hit on something they could produce in quantity in India and sell
in China: opium. By 1841 there were so many Chinese hooked on opium (a problem
also being dealt with by our failing
empire!) the Qing government attempted to ban it — and the British actually
fought a war with China to demand that the opium trade remain legal and that
eight “treaty ports” be opened to British commerce.

Contrary to popular belief,
the Chinese had artillery, but they
mounted their guns in fixed locations and they couldn’t be maneuvered to hit
the British ships that were shelling their harbors — and so the British easily
defeated the Chinese, got their treaty ports and got China to repeal their
anti-drug laws, and humiliated a country and a culture which attached so much
importance to “face.” One response came from a man named Hong, who heard a U.S.
Christian missionary speak in China, decided he was the Chinese version of
Jesus, and launched a revolutionary movement that was a bizarre mixture of
progressive economics (he proposed to end all private ownership of land and
instead the government would own land and license it to the people) and a
degree of social control rivaling Cromwell’s Puritans or the Taliban: they
proposed to ban all entertainment,
gambling, sex between men (just why
these asshole authoritarians are always so down on Gays is beyond me, but it
really does seem to come with the territory) and, of course, drug use. At their
height Hong’s Taiping rebels controlled about one-fourth of China, ruling from
what later became the Nationalist Chinese capital of Nanjing, and the Qing had
to rely on European military aid to suppress them. Just before he was executed,
one of the Taiping leaders warned the generals who were about to put him to
death that they should buy the very best cannon Europeans had to offer, have
Chinese craftsmen study them and learn how to duplicate them, and make
thousands of them so the Chinese could have an effective defense against future
European incursions. Needless to say, they didn’t bother: instead the Qing
court became fair game for the various rapacious European powers, each of which
staked claims on China’s east coastal regions — while the U.S. proclaimed an
“Open Door” policy towards China, which basically sent a message that the U.S.
wouldn’t tolerate one European country trying to colonize China directly the
way the British had with India; instead, all Western countries — including, of course, the U.S. —
should be free to exploit China and bully the Chinese equally.

It got so
ridiculous that after the Boxer rebellion at the turn of the last century (led,
like the Taiping revolution, by a mystic who had absorbed some half-baked
notions of Christianity and decided that he was the second coming of J. C.
himself), the International Legation in Beijing was literally sealed off so only foreigners, not Chinese, could enter.
Wood even showed a shot of the remaining “French Post Office” that was built
during those years and was, as the name suggests, administered directly as a
department of the French post office in France. Wood argued that it was the
crippling reparations payments the Europeans demanded from the Qing government
for the property destroyed by the Boxers that sank the Qing government, especially
since the only way they had to raise the money was to tax the peasants even
more than they’d been doing (an interesting anticipation of the reparations
payments the victors in World War I extracted from the defeated Germans, which
collapsed their economy and helped
Adolf Hitler come to power). It didn’t mention that an additional humiliation
for the Chinese was that the Europeans imposed what was called
“extraterritoriality” on them — that meant that if a European committed a crime
in China he or she would be tried in a court of Europeans according to the laws
of his or her home country, and the Chinese would have no jurisdiction
whatsoever. (The U.S. claims a similar extraterritoriality to this day when it
comes to crimes committed by U.S. servicemembers stationed at overseas bases:
one reason the U.S. precipitately withdrew all its military from Iraq at the
end of the George W. Bush Presidency was the Iraqi government refused to extend
extraterritoriality to U.S. servicemembers at the elaborate network of bases
the U.S. had built there — and without the guarantee of extraterritoriality,
meaning it was possible that a U.S. servicemember who committed a crime against
an Iraqi might actually have to stand trial in an Iraqi court under Iraqi law, the U.S. refused to keep its
servicemembers there.)

The final episode, “The Age of Revolution,” was a
whirlwind tour through the tumultuous history of China in the 20th
century — the fall of the Empire in 1911, its replacement by a more or less
republican government under Sun Yat-Sen until his death in 1925, the civil war
that lasted in China throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s, the emergence of rival
warlords taking on the government of Chiang Kai-Shek and above all the rise of
the Communists under Mao Zedong, son of a peasant couple from China’s
northwestern province of Hunan. (One story I always got a kick out of as an
illustration of the power of a dictator is that when he came to power, Mao
always insisted that only Hunanese food, the spiciest of all Chinese food, be
served at the state dinners — and he reportedly got a sadistic kick out of
seeing people from other parts of China, unused to the hot Hunanese cuisine,
try to get it down.) The show races through some of the highlights of Mao’s
rise to power — the Long March that decimated the ranks of the Chinese
Communist Party, the cave compound Mao lived in between the Long March and his
re-alliance with Chiang’s Kuomintang (“Nationalist”) Party to fight the
Japanese when they invaded mainland China in 1937 (six years after they’d
already conquered Manchuria, renamed it Manchukuo, and installed our old friend
Pu Yi, the boy who’d been the last Qing emperor, as a puppet ruler), followed
by the post-World War II civil war which the Communists won relatively easily and
the extreme Communist policies Mao enforced after that, including forced
collectivization of agriculture (despite how dismally that had worked in the
Soviet Union), the wanton destruction of Chinese culture, the imposition of a
one-child policy (actually a more nuanced idea than the total disaster Wood
made it seem), and the forced relocation of intellectuals to the countryside,
where they had to do manual labor because that was considered the only “really”
socially worthwhile sort of work.

The Chinese Communists practiced a lot of
self-destructive policies but weren’t quite as evil as Wood depicted them, and
though he doesn’t devote a lot of screen time to post-Mao China he approaches
it with a sort of Cold War triumphalism we’ve become all too familiar with in
American historiography: the idea that free-market capitalism is the natural
order of humanity and that Communism, by attempting to abolish individualism
and the Free Market, was going
against the human grain and therefore could bring only misery, famine, mass
starvation and political repression. The show rather petered out as it
attempted to return to the multigenerational Chinese families Wood had
endeavored to trace throughout his series — I’d have much rather seen a plus
ça change, plus ça meme chose ending
noting how much the current Chinese regime resembles its predecessors in
maintaining tight controls on the country’s political and cultural life while
welcoming and encouraging economic development, hoping to make the country (or
at least its urban elites — Wood points out that now, as throughout Chinese
history, most of its people have been peasants and rural China has barely been touched by social, economic or
technological change at all) sufficiently prosperous that its people can
basically be bought off and the good times will keep them from rebelling.